Quote:
Originally Posted by Fields
For all the emphasis everyone puts on fuel as the tiebreaker, not many alliances will get 4 rotors going, even in playoffs.
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To clarify, fuel doesn't become more meaningful (a "tiebreaker" if you wish) after you finish all 4 rotors. Fuel becomes more meaningful after you've finished
as many rotors as you're going to finish. The 4th rotor doesn't get you 6.667 points every gear; it gets you zero points every gear until the last one. Most elim alliances at most events are not going to finish 4 rotors, and--far more importantly--most prevailing ones are not even going to try.
Separately, I think Ginger is right. It's not often we have a direct scoring facet that is critically important but minimally mechanized. It's not that people won't be running gears. I expect to spend most of my time most matches running gears, but the investment is in practice rather than complexity unless you're at the level when you want one of the best gear pickups in the world (we're not).
Think of gear scoring more like drivetrains. Everyone (almost) needs them, they're critically important, but we don't talk about them much. We could make the same arguments about endgames basically every year: "one climb is 50 points, and yet everyone keeps talking about fuel". Or, "climbing is only a couple dozen seconds, and yet everyone talks about it as much as gears".
Importance =/= Match Time =/= Mechanization =/= Scoring Potential
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr V
The 3rd and 4th rotor have pre-populated gears, at least until DCMP and CMP events. So you only need 1 gear for the 1st rotor, 2 gears for the second rotor, 3 for 3rd and 4 for 4th. Since there is the reserve gear that means that you only need to place 9 gears to start all of the rotors spinning and earn the ranking point.
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Please reread Table 3-1 in the manual. EDIT: Or rearticulate--it is 9 gears, but only after subtracting the 3 preloads. Total is 12; the 9 is: (1+2+4+6) - 3 preloads - 1 reserve = 9 from the retrieval station after the preloads.